Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Henri Bergson (1859-1941): French philosopher, awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927; argued that the intuition is deeper than the intellect; his works 'Creative Evolution' (1907) and 'Matter and Memory' (1896) attempted to integrate the findings of biological science with a theory of consciousness; concept of 'élan vital' ('creative impulse' or 'living energy'); offered an interpretation of consciousness as existing on two levels, the first to be reached by deep introspection, the second an external projection of the first. The deeper self is the seat of creative becoming and of free will. Bergson also suggested that the traditional association between the model of space and time is incoherent. Unlike space, time is not measurable by objective standard.

Quotations by Henri Bergson:
"To perceive means to immobilize . . . we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself" and "An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known."

Other Links:
Nobel e-Museum: Henri Bergson

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Writer: André Breton (1896-1966): French Surrealist. Nadja (1928)
~~~~~~~
Photographer: Gisele Freund (1908-2000): French, Portraits of Paris Writers.
~~~~~~~
Video: Tesla - Master of Lightning (2000), PBS Video: good summary of Tesla's life and work
~~~~~~~
CD: Minus 8: Elysian Fields (2000): Nu Jazz
~~~~~

Sunday, February 16, 2003

Ariadne's Thread: According to myth, Ariadne gave Theseus a thread with which to find his way out of the Labyrinth. Today the term is used to describe navigation in difficult environments.

Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who attacked Athens after his son was murdered there. The Athenians submitted and had to sacrifice 14 youths to the Minotaur in his labyrinth every year. She fell in love with Theseus, a young man who volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur, and helped him by giving him a magic sword and a ball of thread so that he could easily find his way out. (Encyclopedia Mythica). Ariadne's story is told, among others, by Gaius Iulius Hyginus in his Fabulae (#42)

Other Links:
Bulfinch's Mythology
Encyclopedia Mythica

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 Edition
~~~~~~~

Meme (pronounced 'meem'): [Source]

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. Term coined by Richard Dawkins in the book 'The Selfish Gene'.

Meme is the mind analogy of 'gene'. Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, i.e. to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

Memes, like genes, vary in their fitness to survive in the environment of human intellect. Some reproduce like bunnies, but are very short-lived (fashions), while others are slow to reproduce, but hang around for eons (religions, perhaps?).

Other Links:
Memes.org
Memes.net


Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Photomodel: Monica Bellucci: Pictures | Bio | Matrix Reloaded
~~~~~~~
Other Supermodels
~~~~~~~
Video: Rand McNally: Southern Africa Safari (1995): Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia
~~~~~~~
CD: Paul Simon: Graceland (1986)
~~~~~~~
CD: Michelle Branch: The Spirit Room (2001)
~~~~~~~

Friday, February 14, 2003

Seifollah Samadian: The White Station (1999): The Iranian filmmaker took the pictures for this film out of the window during a snow storm in Tehran. A description reads:

"On 13 January 1998, the Iranian capital of Tehran is swept by an incredible snowstorm. As far as the eye can see, everything is covered by a thick layer of snow. The snow keeps falling ceaselessly, while a lone figure waits for a bus. The dark silhouette, which in the end credits is thanked as "the waiting stranger", stands out against the white background. Two hands cling to a dark umbrella; both feet gradually disappear beneath the white blanket of snow. The scene is filmed from the window of a room on the opposite side of the road. The only audible sound is that of the wind, at times sweeping the snow by almost horizontally. On the screen, everything is reduced to its essence, in natural black and white. Aside from a few passers-by, one of them walking backwards against the storm, the area is a no man's land, marked only by the promising sign of the bus stop." (Source).

The film was also presented at the Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002.

Other Links:
Documenta11 (Home)


Snippets:
~~~~~~~
CD: Dido: No Angel (1999)
~~~~~~~
Photographer: Paul Strand
~~~~~~~

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Cuba Missle Crisis: In 1962 the stationing of Russian nuclear war heads in Cuba brought the world to the brink of a, possibly nuclear, war between the two super powers. The intense decision making process is documented in transcripts of discussions that were secretly taped in the White House (The Kennedy Files)

Movie: Thirteen Days (2000), with Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood

Text of the Letters exchanged between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy from 1961-1963. Especially interesting are documents #65 to #70, written in the heart of the crisis.

I found the following passage by Khrushchev most impressive:

"Mr. President, I appeal to you to weigh well what the aggressive, piratical actions, which you have declared the USA intends to carry out in international waters, would lead to. You yourself know that any sensible man simply cannot agree with this, cannot recognize your right to such actions.

If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.

Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this." (Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, Moscow, October 26, 1962, 7 p.m.)

Other Links: Cuba Missle Crisis:
Wikipedia
Time Line
National Security Agenecy (NSA)
National Security Archive

Sunday, February 09, 2003

Hans Joachim Stoerig: Kleine Weltgeschichte der Philosophie (in German): René Descartes (1596-1649): preference for mathematics combined with scepticism against all other sciences; alternating phases of reclusiveness / concentration and adventurous life style; two basic elements of cartesian thinking: God and Soul, but logically discussed; tried to approach philosophy as a kind of universal mathematics, reducing all philosophical principles by deduction from simple basic elements; first awareness that everything that I know or perceive can be wrong; then out of this doubt follows at least the basic assurance of being a thinking entity; this leads to 'cogito ergo sum' (I think, therfore I am) as a fundamental starting point.

Other Links:
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: René Descartes

George Berkeley (1685-1753), Irish philosopher: Esse Est Percipi: To Be Is To Be Seen (more exactly: the ability to be seen). In German: Sein heisst wahrgenommen werden (genauer: wahrgenommen werden koennen)

Berkeley was close to British Empirism: God stands high above us, and his ways are not intuitive to man. We therefore cannot know his laws (laws of nature) to begin with, and cannot find them through logical deduction. We have to learn them through observation and experience.

Berkeley also was a consequent Idealist (as opposed to a Materialist): The only objects of human knowledge are ideas and the minds that have the ideas. How can that be? If all exists only in our minds, what difference does exist between the sun in the sky, a sun that we dream about, and a sun that we can imagine at any given point in time. Berkeley says that the vision of the 'real' sun occurs in all minds to the same extend, whereas the 'dreamed' sun is only happening in one (my own) mind, and the 'imagined' sun only in my mind if I want to imagine it.

Modern theory of Ideas: ideas are formed in three ways :
1.) directly imprinted on the senses
2.) introspected in the mind (passions, emotions)
3.) formed by memory and imagination

Other Links:
George Berkeley's Philosophy
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: George Berkeley

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
DJ Duo: Kruder & Dorfmeister: Drum and Bass
~~~~~~~

Thursday, February 06, 2003

Difficult (Failed) Journeys:

1.) Ernest Shackleton's Antarctis Expedition (1914-1916): Failed expedition with the objective to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent on foot.
Links:
Nova: Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance
Antarctic Connection: The Endurance

2.) Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills in Australia (1860-1861): The fatal attempt to cross the Australian continent; exposed to many dangers, especially shortage of water and food.
Links:
Terra Incognita

3.) The Donner Party (1846-1847): 90 emigrants on their way to California get trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Nov. 1846 with insufficient food supplies. Cannibalism occured.
Links:
Chronology
PBS Special: The Donner Party
The Donner Party by Daniel Lewis
The Donner Party by Daniel M. Rosen

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
CD: Freddie Hubbard: Hub-Tones: superb!
~~~~~~~
Painter: Sidney Nolan, Australia
~~~~~~~

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980): Polish/American Art Deco Painter, born in Warsaw; painted portraits of writers, entertainers, artists, scientists, industrialists, and many of Eastern Europe's exiled nobility.
1918: Paris, first paintings
1925: exhibits at first Art Deco exhibition in Paris
1939: America, including Beverly Hills and New York
1960: changed style to abstract
1962: gave up painting after death of her husband
Her daughter, Kizette de Lempica-Foxhall, wrote the biography of Tamara de Lempicka called 'Passion By Design'.

Other Links:
Tamara de Lempicka: Paintings
Tamara de Lempicka: Biography

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Boston: Irish Pub: Black Rose: 160 State St, near Farneuil Hall Marketplace
~~~~~~~

Saturday, February 01, 2003

Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
January 2003


1.) Getting started
2.) Ground rule
3.) Seneca: Was ist wesentlich?
4.) Froogle
5.) Sue Townsend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4
6.) When does war begin?
7.) Dedication
8.) Meditation
9.) Spirit and music
10.) Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
11.) Stoicism and Epicureanism
12.) Pax Romana
13.) Erasing computer hard drives
14.) Value on the job
15.) Milan Kundera: The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire
16.) SWOT analysis
17.) WWW resources: Wikipedia and WebRing
18.) Guinness
19.) Supersize meals
20.) What Science Is And How It Works: Types of discoveries
21.) Sprites and Elves
22.) Jules Henri Poincaré
23.) Who invented radio?
24.) Nikola Tesla and Tesla Wardenclyffe Project
25.) Elias Canetti: Die Blendung
26.) Eratosthenes
27.) Arai Hakuseki
28.) Gregory Neil Derry: What Science Is And How It Works (cont.)
29.) Henry David Thoreau and Transcendentalism
30.) What Science Is And How It Works (cont.): Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma

Became a Wikipedian today. User name: Dynamic Planet. Find contributions here.